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EXHIBITION FEATURES FILMS FROM A DIVERSITY OF GENRES ABOUT WARS THAT NEVER TOOK PLACE

For Immediate Release September 2000

The Imaginary War September 14–October 15, 2000 The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters 1 and 2

The Imaginary War is an international selection of films about fictional wars that served as warnings or critiques of real wars. The exhibition includes a range of films, from Aelita (1924), Yakov Protazanov’s fantasy of a proletarian uprising on Mars, and the Marx Brothers’s anti- totalitarian burlesque Duck Soup (1933), to ’s atomic satire Dr. Strangelove (1964) and Barry Levinson’s prescient Wag the Dog (1997). The Imaginary War, part of The ’s Open Ends exhibition, is on view from September 14 to October 15, 2000. The program was organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film and Video.

The Imaginary War was inspired by a comment Jean-Luc Godard made about his 1963 film Les Carabiniers, an anti-war allegory that shatters all conventions of the genre by blending documentary actuality and fanciful invention: “In dealing with war, I followed a very simple rule. I assumed I had to explain to children not only what war is, but what all wars have been …rather as if I were illustrating the many—yet always drearily familiar—faces of war by projecting imagerie sheets through a magic lantern, in the manner of the early cameramen who used to fabricate newsreels.”

The Imaginary War features a diversity of genres—science fiction and fantasy, slapstick comedy and the political thriller, pseudo-documentary and experimental and animation works. Through these various and imaginative forms, filmmakers have created fictional wars to reflect antiwar or jingoistic sentiments. Examples include the rise of the Nazis in Leo McCarey’s Duck Soup (1933), and their aspirations to world domination in William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come (1936); the Cold War in Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), ’s Fail-Safe (1964), Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), John Frankenheimer’s Seven Days in May (1964), and Lewis Gilbert’s You Only Live Twice (1967); Korea in Norman McLaren’s Neighbours (1952); Vietnam in ’s Shame (1968); Grenada in Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge (1986); and the Gulf War in Levinson’s Wag the Dog (1997).

The dangers of the nuclear age brought many films anticipating the end of the world. Among the most memorable and innovative were Kurt Neumann’s Rocketship XM (1950), Byron Haskin’s The War of the Worlds (1953), ’s The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), and Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1967). Colonialism and imperialism—American in particular—have provoked directors both at home and abroad as well. In the ,

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Woody Allen in Bananas 1971) and Paul Verhoeven in Starship Troopers (1997); in Canada, Joyce Wieland in Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968); in Great Britain, Jack Arnold in The Mouse that Roared (1959) and in (1982); and in Australia, George Miller in II: The Road Warrior(1981).

Other films featured in the exhibition evoke the aftermath of military coups and the fate of resistance movements. These films included ’s Paris Belongs to Us(1960), François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966), René Laloux’s Savage Planet (1973), George Romero’s Code Name: Trixie (1973), Peter Lilienthal’s Calm Prevails over the Country(1976), and Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988).

SPONSORSHIP

Open Ends

is part of MoMA2000, which is made possible by The Starr Foundation. Generous support is provided by Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro in memory of Louise Reinhardt Smith. The Museum gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Contemporary Exhibition Fund of The Museum of Modern Art, established with gifts from Lily Auchincloss, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, and Jo Carole and Ronald S. Lauder. Additional funding is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Mrs. Melville Wakeman Hall, Sarah-Ann and Werner H. Kramarsky, Anna Marie and Robert F. Shapiro, Jerry I. Speyer and Katherine G. Farley, Joann and Gifford Phillips, NEC Technologies, Inc., and by The Contemporary Arts Council and The Junior Associates of The Museum of Modern Art. Education programs accompanying MoMA2000 are made possible by BNP Paribas. The publication Modern Contemporary: Art at MoMA Since 1980 is made possible by The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art. The interactive environment of Open Ends is supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Film and video programs during Open Ends are supported by The Times Company Foundation. Web/kiosk content management software is provided by SohoNet.

The Imaginary War Screening Schedule: T1: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1 T2: The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 2

Thursday, September 14, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, September 23, 2:30 p.m. T2

Breathdeath: A Trageede in Masks. 1964. USA. Directed by Stan VanDerBeek. Soundtrack by Jay Watt. Using the technique of collage animation, VanDerBeek compares modern man in a nuclear age with the vision of death portrayed in fifteenth-century woodcuts. Blending newsreel footage mocking social concerns about the end of the world with images of Hollywood and warfare, the film, VanDerBeek says, “superimposes on a Karl Marx battlefield.” 15 min.

Duck Soup. 1933. USA. Directed by Leo McCarey. Screenplay by Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby. Additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman, Nat Perrin. Cinematography by Henry Sharp. With Groucho Marx, Harpo Marx, , Zeppo Marx, Margaret Dumont. Duck Soup was such a flop when it opened in 1933 that Paramount dropped its contract with the Marx Bros. With the American economy in collapse, Hitler on the rise in Germany, and democracy faltering at home and abroad, audiences were simply not in the mood for a political satire that held nothing sacred and left nothing

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unscathed, particularly one in which a mythical country named Freedonia goes to war with neighboring Sylvania for the hell of it. Though Duck Soup was provocative enough to have been banned in Italy by Mussolini, Leo McCarey, its director, insisted that the only political message intended was “to kid dictators,” and Groucho confided that “We didn’t fight this war out of love for Freedonia, you know. We fought that war because we wanted to throw things.” 75 min.

Friday, September 15, 3:00 p.m.; Saturday, September 16, 2:30 p.m. T2

Interplanetary Revolution. 1924. USSR. Designed for the Animation Workshop by E. Komissarenko, Y. Merkulov, N. Khodatayev. Cinematography by V. Alexejev. In 1924 a production workshop for animated films was established at the State Film Technicum, and for the first time stop- motion animation (using puppets and flat drawings) was recognized as an effective tool of Soviet agitprop, particularly in celebration of the October Revolution and in promotion of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. The first of the workshop’s productions was Interplanetary Revolution, a parody of the sensational utopian film-fantasy Aelita, directed earlier that year by Yakov Protazanov from Tolstoy’s 1923 best-seller about a proletarian revolution on Mars. 10 min.

Aelita. 1924. USSR. Directed by Yakov Protazanov. Screenplay by Fyodor Otsep and Alexei Faiko, based on the novel by Alexei Tolstoy. Cinematography by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky and E. Schönemann. With Valentina Kuinzhi, Nikolai Tseretelli, Konstantin Eggert, Yulia Solntseva, Yuri Zavadsky. As J. Hoberman recounts in The Red Atlantis, “Aelita was the most publicized Soviet film before Potemkin concretized the revolution in 1925....A target for vanguard film critics and doctrinaire politicos alike, Aelita was attacked as too expensive, too Western, too bourgeois, and too convoluted, not to mention anti-Soviet and antiproletariat. After the establishment of ‘socialism in one’s country’ in 1931, space fantasy was no longer legal, and soon after, Aelita’s innocently Trotskyist fantasy of interplanetary solidarity was forbidden altogether.” English intertitles. Silent film with piano accompaniment by Ben Model (Sept. 15) and Stuart Oderman (Sept. 16). Approx. 80 min.

Saturday, September 16, 5:00 p.m.; Monday, September 18, 3:00 p.m. T2

Things to Come. 1936. Great Britain. Directed by William Cameron Menzies. Screenplay by H.G. Wells, based on his essay. Cinematography by George Perinal. With Raymond Massey, Ralph Richardson, Maurice Braddell, Edward Chapman, Sophie Stewart. For all its purple prose and muddled idealism, Things to Come remains one of the truly inventive science-fiction film fantasies. H.G. Wells wrote the screenplay adaptation of his 1933 essay “The Shape of Things to Come,” a prophetic forecast of civilization’s collapse under fascism and totalitarianism. Although audiences at the time reportedly howled in disbelief at the prospect of bombers flying over the coast of England, the film’s shockingly realistic opening air raids on the London-like Everytown, Christmas Eve 1940, would come true soon enough. But after sweeping through a dark century of war, barbarism, and oppression, Things to Come opens onto a brave new world in the year 2036, when technology and scientific progress have eliminated disease and poverty and paved the way to freedom through air conditioning, high-tech telecommunications, and resplendent deco-futurist furnishings. 100 min.

Sunday, September 17, 1:00p.m. T2; Tuesday, October 3, 2:00 p.m. T1

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Starship Troopers. 1997. USA. Directed by Paul Verhoeven. Screenplay by Ed Neumeier, based on a novel by Robert A. Heinlein. Cinematography by Jost Vacano. With Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Jake Busey, Neil Patrick Harris. Like so many of Verhoeven’s films, Starship Troopers unleashed a torrent of bad press on its release, this time accusing the director, who as a child had lived in Nazi-occupied Holland, of being borderline fascist. Based on the 1959 novel by Robert A. Heinlein—which had been rejected by the author’s longtime publisher for its right-wing militarism—Starship Troopers opens with a mock recruitment ad looking for a few square-jawed high school teens who will rise to the challenge of full-scale interstellar war with giant alien bugs. Bathing the film in grisly yet ironical violence, Verhoeven takes his retro- future aesthetic from disparate sources: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Archie comics, ’s Rio Bravo and Ray Harryhausen’s Jason and the Argonauts, jingoist World War II platoon movies, “Duck-and- Cover” educational films and extraterrestrial arachnoid movies like Them! (1954) and The Deadly Mantis (1957). 129 min.

Sunday, September 17, 3:30 p.m.; Friday, September 22, 3:00 p.m. T2

Rocketship XM. 1950. USA. Written and directed by Kurt Neumann. Additional dialogue by Orville Hampton. Cinematography by . With Lloyd Bridges, Osa Massen, John Emery, Noah Beery, Jr., Hugh O’Brian. Man’s first exploration of the moon goes awry when the rocketship veers off course and the astronauts are forced to land on Mars. With echoes of Odysseus’s encounter with the Cyclops, the space captain and his crew are attacked by blind Stone-Age Martians—survivors of an atomic holocaust—and the astronauts’ chances of escape are slim. Although director Kurt Neumann is best known for The Fly, Rocketship X-M benefits from the brilliant photography of fellow German emigré Karl Struss; one critic described the film’s black and white tonalities and Struss’s use of red for the Mars sequences (shot in Red Rock Canyon with filters) as “pulp poetry.” 70 min.

Sunday, September 17, 5:00 p.m.; Tuesday, September 19, 3:00 p.m. T2

The Day the Earth Caught Fire. 1961. Great Britain. Directed by Val Guest. Screenplay by Val Guest, Wolf Mankowitz. Cinematography by Harry Waxman. With Janet Munro, Leo McKern, Edward Judd, Michael Goodliffe, Bernard Braden. An infelicitous coincidence of thermonuclear tests by the Soviets at the North Pole and the Americans at the South sets the earth on a collision course with the sun. Ice storms paralyze New York, the Sahara is flooded, and really bad heat waves leave Englishmen to stew in their own juices. Val Guest and his co-screenwriter Wolf Mankowitz strove for an authentic documentary tone by keeping attuned to the jargon of nuclear technology and meteorology and by filming much of the action in the pressroom of London’s Daily Express. As a result, The Day the Earth Caught Fire was praised for its scientific credibility. 98 min.

The War Game. 1967. Great Britain. Written and directed by Peter Watkins. Cinematography by Peter Bartlett. With Michael Aspel, Peter Graham, III. The BBC commissioned Peter Watkins to film The War Game expecting a sober, tempered evaluation of Britain’s capacity to withstand a limited nuclear attack. But Watkins instead intended The War Game as a jeremiad against those who preferred to remain silent about the dangers of the arms race, and because his dramatic enactment of the bomb’s aftereffects looked too much like the real thing, the BBC banned the pseudo- documentary from the airwaves. The film’s imagined atrocities occur when an errant Soviet bomb lands on a small Kent town. Doubtless, it was

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Watkins’s verité style that alarmed and offended many British viewers, particularly those still haunted by memories of the Blitz. 47 min.

Monday, September 18, 6:00 p.m.; Thursday, September 21, 3:00 p.m. T2

The War of the Worlds. 1953. USA. Directed by Byron Haskin. Screenplay by Barré Lyndon, based on the novel by H.G. Wells. Cinematography by George Barnes. With Gene Barry, Ann Robinson, Les Tremayne, Bob Cornthwaite, Sandro Giglio. “[Producer ] altered the location of the original Wells novel from London in 1890 to in 1953 and made several other changes—the famous Martian war machines in the shape of walking tripods have been replaced by sinister flying saucer-like craft, for instance… [Nonetheless] War of the Worlds is a film that is less a simple mirror of American attitudes and fears of the fifties and more a reflection of man’s conservative responses to the idea of other life- forms before the possibility of such contact was seen as possible.” (Phil Hardy, ed., The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Science Fiction). 85 min.

Friday, September 22, 6:00 p.m. T2; Saturday, September 30, 2:00 p.m. T1

Les Carabiniers (The Riflemen). 1963. France. Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Screenplay by Roberto Rossellini, Jean Gruault, Jean-Luc Godard, based on the play by Benjamin Joppolo. Cinematography by Raoul Coutard. With Geneviève Galéa, Catherine Ribéro, Marino Mase, Albert Juross, Gérard Poirot. “A deliberately grainy and grotesque anti-war film, it is also one of the most lyrical and compassionate pictures Godard has ever made. It is a fairy story of disgust, about primitive, peasant characters, made up and molded in a silent comedy style... One day two riflemen, representatives of the “King,” come to entice two boy-men to war with promises of fame and fortune….The two brothers are both outrageous and strangely sympathetic. They send glowing post cards home of the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, Gay Paree, of fatalities and fantasies… They kill and plunder in hopes of a reward. They are ignorant brutes and dreamers.” (Molly Haskell, Cahiers du Cinema). 80 min.

Friday, September 22, 8:00 p.m.; Sunday, September 24, 5:00 p.m. T2

La Jetée. 1963. Written and directed by Chris Marker. Cinematography by Jean Chiabaud. With Hélène Chatelain, Jacques Ledoux, Davos Hanich, André Heinrich, Jacques Branchu. has called Chris Marker “the prototype of the Twenty-first Century Man”—an apt description for an artist who has devoted a half-century of film- and videomaking to an investigation of the elasticity of time, the fragility of memory, and what Marker describes as “life in the process of becoming history and yet not aware of it.” His short La Jetée, told almost entirely in still images, was praised by Pauline Kael as one of the great science fiction movies and later remade as ’s fiction feature 12 Monkeys. “H” lives in a post-nuclear-war Paris where survivors live in a network of subterranean vaults. Time has been thrown mysteriously out of kilter and the survivors live in the perpetual present—all, that is, but “H.” 28 min.

Fahrenheit 451. 1966. France. Directed by François Truffaut. Screenplay by Truffaut and Jean-Louis Richard, based on the novel by Ray Bradbury. Cinematography by Nicholas Roeg. With , Oskar Werner, Cyril Cusack, Anton Diffring, Jeremy Spenser. Truffaut’s first color film is a dark, austere reading of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, in which a totalitarian regime of the immediate future wages a campaign to stamp out

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dissent by employing firemen to confiscate books and burn them (the title refers to the temperature at which paper ignites). Truffaut was a devout reader with eclectic tastes, his passion running from Balzac and Henry James to pulp fiction writers like David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich. And so the recurrent, hypnotic, barbaric image of flames lapping at the edges of books and then engulfing them held particular poignancy for him. 110 min.

Saturday, September 23, 5:00 p.m. ; Monday, September 25, 3:00 p.m.; Friday, October 6, 8:00 p.m. T2

Rat Life and Diet in North America. 1968. Canada/USA. Directed by Joyce Wieland. Canadian native Joyce Wieland made this agitated, fourteen- minute riff on imperialism, environmentalism, sexism, consumerism, and cultural chauvinism while living in New York in 1968—ingeniously wrapping her politics in the guise of a satirical live-action fable about rat political prisoners who rebel against their American cat oppressors and escape to Canada, where they take up organic gardening, feast at a millionaire’s banquet table, and celebrate flower and cherry festivals, only to have their utopian community invaded by the United States. 13 min. Bananas. 1971. USA. Directed by . Screenplay by Woody Allen, Mickey Rose. Cinematography by Andrew Costikyan. With Woody Allen, Louise Lasser, Carlos Montalban, Jacobo Morales. Among Woody Allen’s films, Bananas is perhaps most deeply rooted in the American tradition of film comedy, from the silent slapstick humor of Chaplin and the Keystone Cops, to the verbal wit of Groucho Marx, Bob Hope, and W.C. Fields. Allen plays Fielding Mellish (a Marxist name, that), a nebbishy product-tester who hopes to get lucky with a perky liberal activist but ends up unwittingly joining a group of guerilla revolutionaries in a South American banana republic. 82 min.

Sunday, September 24, 1:00 p.m. T2; Monday, October 2, 6:00 p.m. T1

5 Million Years to Earth (Quartermass and the Pit). 1967. Great Britain. Directed by Roy Ward Baker. Original story and screenplay by Nigel Kneale. Cinematography by Arthur Grant. With James Donald, Andrew Keir, Barbara Shelley, Julian Glover, Duncan Lamont. Expansion work on London’s subway system leads to the accidental unearthing of a mysterious missile embedded in the earth (an opening reminiscent of Powell and Pressburger’s The Small Back Room). The bomb squad’s attempts to diffuse the missile result in the disastrous unleashing of ancient demon insects from Mars and in apocalyptic earthquakes, floods, and fire. The third in Hammer Films’ Quartermass series is an intriguing science-fiction detective thriller that raises provocative questions about human evolution, eugenics, and racial memory. 98 min.

Sunday, September 24, 3:00 p.m.; Saturday, October 7, 2:30 p.m. T2

Le Dernier (The Last One). 1972. France. Written and directed by Olivier Landau. Cinematography by Jean Boffety, Christian Guillouet, Guy Lecouvette, François Lartigue. With Olivier Arella. A small boy in a nursery filled with toy guns and soldiers awakens to find that he’s the only survivor of a war that has left his town in ruins. Landau’s silent short was filmed in a French village that had been completely destroyed during World War II and left in that state as a reminder of what happened. 11 min. La Planète Sauvage (Savage Planet/Fantastic Planet). 1973. France.

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Directed by René Laloux. Screenplay by Roland Topor, René Laloux, based on the novel Oms en Serie by Stefan Wul. Cinematography by Lubomir Reithar and Boris Baromykin. Winner of a Special Grand Prize at Cannes in 1973, Savage Planet is an eerily disquieting animated allegory about a race of giant blue humanoids called Draags, who lord over the planet Yagam and walk tiny humanlike animals called Oms on leashes. Based on the popular Czech novel Ohms en serie by Stefan Wul, René Laloux and Ronald Torpor’s Savage Planet is, like its recent predecessor Yellow Submarine, an aesthetic pastiche of psychedelic Pop Art and the fantastic visions of Bosch, Tanguy, Dali, Redon and Dr. Seuss. Although clearly alluding to repression behind the Iron Curtain, the film’s slave narrative is as old as the ages and transcends the political exigencies of its time. 70 min.

Monday, September 25, 6:00 p.m.; Sunday, October 15, 3:00 p.m. T2

The Mouse that Roared.

1959. Great Britain. Directed by Jack Arnold. Screenplay by Roger MacDougall, Stanley Mann, based on the novel by Leonard Wibberley. Cinematography by John Wilcox. With , Jean Seberg, William Hartnell, David Kossoff, Leo McKern. In his essay on Cold War films in The Crazy Mirror, Raymond Durgnat observed, “Carl Foreman, a liberal refugee from McCarthyism, living in exile in England, ventures The Mouse that Roared, with a Ruritanian statesman (Sellers) leading his comic opera army on an invasion of New York, to qualify for aid as a defeated nation...it offers a delightfully non-Manichean view of global politics, and is whimsically ‘third world’ in its orientation.” In preparation for his role as the bungling Inspector Clouseau, Sellers is called on to juggle the triple roles of grand duchess, prime minister, and army field marshal. 83 min.

Tuesday, September 26, 3:00 p.m. T2; Saturday, September 30, 3:00 p.m. T1

Skammen (Shame). 1968. Sweden. Written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. Cinematography by . With Liv Ullman, Max Von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand, Sigge Fürst, Barbro Hiort Af Ornäs. Gazing slightly into the future, Sweden circa 1971, Bergman imagines the disintegration of a marriage of two violinists who try in vain to escape a civil war on the Swedish mainland by taking refuge on a remote island farm. Shame is one of Bergman’s most overtly political films, a critique of the war that was raging in Vietnam and also of Sweden’s neutrality during World War II. 103 min.

Tuesday, September 26, 6:00 p.m.; Thursday, September 28, 3:00 p.m. T2

Fail-Safe.1964. USA. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Screenplay by Walter Bernstein, based on the novel by , Harvey Wheeler. Cinematography by Gerald Hirschfeld. With , Dan O’Herlihy, Walter Matthau, Frank Overton, Fritz Weaver. Made in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Fail-Safe is said to have been unpopular with President Johnson because the film provocatively suggested that the U.S. was dangerously unprepared to avert a nuclear crisis. Fail-Safe was also unpopular with Stanley Kubrick, who threatened to sue if they didn’t postpone the release of Lumet’s film until after the release of his own Dr. Strangelove, which Columbia also happened to be distributing. Lumet’s film is a throwback to the earnest, suspenseful television morality plays of the 1950s that were his training ground. The irony is that Fail-Safe ends with a Kubrickian absurdity: to avert

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nuclear war and appease the Russians, President Henry Fonda is forced to bomb New York. 112 min.

Thursday, September 28, 6:00 p.m. T2; Friday, September 29, 2:30 p.m. T1

Seven Days in May. 1964. USA. Directed by John Frankenheimer. Screenplay by Rod Serling, based on the novel by Fletcher Knebel, Charles W. Bailey, II. Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredericks. With , , Fredric March, Ava Gardner, Edmond O’Brien. Released in 1964, the same year as Dr. Strangelove and Fail-Safe, Seven Days in May is set a few years hence. When a dovish President successfully negotiates a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia, riots break out on the streets of America between the peaceniks and the hawks, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff hatches a plot to overthrow the government. Significantly, Seven Days in May was one of the first Hollywood films to attack McCarthyism by name. Today it remains one of Frankenheimer’s most candid statements on the short path from jingoism to fanaticism, the dehumanizing effects of technology, and the perils of military power in a democratic society. 118 min.

Friday, September 29, 6:00 p.m. T1; Monday, October 9, 6:00 p.m. T2

You Only Live Twice. 1967. Great Britain. Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Screenplay by Roald Dahl, based on the novel by Ian Fleming. Cinematography by . With , , Tetsuro Tamba, Mie Hama, Teru Shimada. The world is pushed to the brink of nuclear war when SPECTRE, the international crime syndicate led by the evil genius Ernest Stavro Blofeld and his fluffy white Persian cat, hijacks U.S. and Russian space capsules and deceives each superpower into believing the other is the aggressor. is “buried” at sea so that he can be secreted into in order to locate the missing rockets. You Only Live Twice was Connery’s fifth and penultimate Bond film before a long hiatus. It benefited from Roald Dahl’s screenplay, which snaps with Cold War relevance and self-referential parody; Ken Adam’s playful East-West production design; Freddie Young’s exotic location photography; Nancy Sinatra’s sassy theme song; and, of course, Q’s arsenal of the latest in high-tech gadgetry. 117 min.

Friday, September 29, 8:15 p.m. T1; Saturday, September 30, 5:00 p.m. T2

Heartbreak Ridge. 1986. USA. Directed by Clint Eastwood. Screenplay by James Carabatsos and Joseph Stinson. Cinematography by Jack N. Green. With Clint Eastwood, Marsha Mason, Mario Van Peebles, Everett MacGill, Moses Gunn, Eileen Heckart. The 1980s witnessed a resurgence of Cold War vengeance movies like George P. Cosmatos’s Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), which tried to undo America’s defeat in Vietnam, and ’s Red Dawn (1984) and Donald Wrye’s Amerika (1987), in which the good guys successfully fend off a Soviet invasion. The rout of Grenada is the barely camouflaged subject of Heartbreak Ridge (1986), another mythmaking film that seemed to capture the anxieties and longings of the contemporary political climate. Eastwood plays a Marine Sergeant once decorated for his bravery in Korea and Vietnam, now scorned. Because the modern army knows nothing of war, Eastwood alone is capable of turning a bunch of ragtag soldiers into an efficient platoon, leading them in a heroic rescue of American medical students held hostage on an unnamed Latin American island. 130 min.

Sunday, October 1, 2:00 p.m., T1; Sunday, October 8, 2:30 p.m. T2

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers. 1956. USA. Directed by Don Siegel. Screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring, based on the Collier’s Magazine story by Jack Finney. Cinematography by Ellsworth Fredricks. With Kevin McCarthy, , Larry Gates, King Donovan, . Shot in nineteen days for less than $300,000, Invasion of the Body Snatchers was an immediate sensation and became known as the Cold War paranoia film non pareil, equally interpreted as a left-wing allegory about the McCarthy- era witchhunts, a right-wing cautionary tale about the Red menace, or an apolitical assault on 1950s conformity. Although aware of these potential interpretations when he made the film, Don Siegel slyly described Body Snatchers, in which alien beings gestate in pods and take over the bodies of humans, as his act of revenge on studio heads, who for him embodied all that was narrow-minded and soulless. Indeed, Siegel had originally planned to called the film Sleep No More, an allusion to Hamlet’s soliloquy about alienation and suicide. But the title was tossed when executives failed to get the reference. 85 min.

Sunday, October 1, 2:30 p.m.; Monday, October 2, 6:00 p.m. T2

Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us). 1960. France. Directed by Jacques Rivette. Screenplay by Rivette and Jean Gruault. Cinematography by Charles Bitsch. With Betty Schneider, Giani Esposito, Françoise Prevost, and appearances by Claude Chabrol, Jacques Demy, and Hans Lucas (Jean-Luc Godard). Jacques Rivette was the first among the Cahiers du Cinéma critics to begin directing a feature film, having shot in fits and starts between 1957 and 1959, and François Truffaut said the film’s eventual release in 1960 was “a score for every member of our team—or of our Mafia, if you prefer.” A woman from the provinces moves to Paris (as Rivette himself did) and is drawn into a group of idealistic young intellectuals and artists who are rehearsing a stage production of Pericles. Among them is an American expatriate who has fled McCarthyite persecution in the States, and who now convinces the group that an unseen, malevolent Organization plans to control the world and then destroy it. The film’s title conveys the sense of unbridled optimism and self-entitlement that young Parisians seemed to embody at the dawn of the 1960s. But the fear of an imagined threat—a government conspiracy? the Bomb?— anticipates the descent into despair and chaos at that decade’s end, a foreshadowing of the crisis of May ‘68. In French, English subtitles. 120 min.

Sunday, October 1, 5:00p.m. T2; Monday, October 2, 2:00 p.m. T1

Es Herrscht Ruhe Im Land (Calm Prevails Over the Country). 1976. Federal Republic of Germany. Directed by Peter Lilienthal. Screenplay by Lilienthal and Antonio Skármeta. Cinematography by Robby Müller. With Charles Vanel. A German Jew born in 1929, Peter Lilienthal fled the country with his family in 1939 and settled in Montevideo, Uruguay. While living in Chile in the early 1970s, Lilienthal forged a friendship with the writer Antonio Skármeta (the author of the novel on which Il Postino was based), which led to an interest in the social and political upheaval of the Allende era and in the theme of exile. Pinochet’s coup in 1973 made Lilienthal a refugee once more, this time fleeing to Portugal, where he made Calm Prevails Over the Country, about the fate of political dissidents during martial law in an unnamed South American country (the scenes of the prison camp at the national stadium shed any doubt of the country in question). With an intuitive understanding of the dilemmas and hardships of ordinary people living in extraordinary circumstances, Lilienthal focuses on petit-bourgeois types who either compromise themselves by collaborating with the military junta or who sacrifice

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their comforts for a hardscrabble life of activist commitment. In German, English subtitles. 103 min.

Sunday, October 1, 5:00 p.m. T1; Friday, October 13, 8:00 p.m. T2; Saturday, October 14, 2:30 p.m. T2

Blade Runner. 1982. USA. Directed by Ridley Scott. Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Cinematography by . With Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh. Whether made in Hollywood or abroad, many fantasy films of the 1980s used violence to fulfill a wish to symbolically vanquish “the others”—alien types who seemed to be corrupting the world on their way to taking it over. The British director Tony Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) envisioned a future where crime and overcrowding have driven the wealthy elite to offshore colonies, leaving the wretched refuse of Asian and other non-English speaking people to live like animals. Beneath the shadows of proto-fascist skyscrapers (borrowed from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926), William Cameron Menzies’ Things to Come (1936), and the architectural visions of Hugh Ferris) lies a labyrinth of neon- drenched streets teeming with the cacophony of a modern-day . Harrison Ford, the reluctant hero, is a Blade Runner, summoned to hunt down and kill a group of genetically engineered artificial humans before they find the key to immortality and render humanity obsolete. The film caused a sensation at a time when the West was demonizing Japanese businessmen as ruthless, greedy automatons bent on world domination. 117 min.

Tuesday, October 3, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, October 7, 5:00 p.m. T2

Akira. 1988. Japan. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo. Screenplay by Katsuhiro Otomo, and Izo Hashimoto. Cinematography by Katsuji Misawa. With the voices of Mitsuo Iwara, Nozomu Sasaki, Mami Koyama, Taro Ishida. Anyone unfamiliar with Japanese anime should start with Akira. Adapted by Katsuhiro Otomo from his wildly popular manga (a serialized comic strip) and billed as the most expensive animated feature to come out of Japan, Akira was described by one critic as “Blade Runner meets Speed Racer,” with the stress on hyperkinetic, ultraviolent action. The story begins on June 16, 1988. Scarcely forty-five years after the first atomic bombs leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War III is in full swing and Tokyo is obliterated in a nuclear attack. Out of the ashes a new Tokyo is built, and by 2019 all is right and well again in the naked city, for Neo-Tokyo has become a dystopic metropolis under threat of martial law, where students are rioting and swat teams are clubbing them, urban terrorists are blowing up entire neighborhoods, rival teen motorcycle gangs are waging turf wars, and the government is cooking up a crackpot scheme to rid the world of mere mortals by replacing them with superhumans through a series of secret brain experiments. In English. 124 min.

Tuesday, October 3, 6:00 p.m. T1; Sunday, October 15, 1:00 p.m. T2

Neighbours. 1952. Canada. Produced, directed, and animated by Norman McLaren for the National Film Board. Cinematography by Wolf Koenig. Music by McLaren. With Koenig, Grant Munro, Jean Paul Ladouceur, Clarke Daprato. “I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People’s Republic of China,” Norman McLaren recalled in 1975. “Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao’s revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the

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Korean War began. My sympathies were divided at that time. I felt myself to be as close to the Chinese people as I felt proud of my status as a Canadian. I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war.” When Neighbours was released in 1952, McLaren was pressured to excise the scenes of women and children being beaten to death; but years later, in a gesture of protest against the war in Vietnam, McLaren re-inserted the footage and restored the film to its original state. 8 min. Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.1964. USA. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Screenplay by Kubrick, , and Peter George. Cinematography by Gilbert Taylor. With Peter Sellers, George C. Scott, Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens. “Dr. Strangelove came from my great desire to do something about the nuclear nightmare….I was struck by the paradoxes of every variation of the problem from one extreme to the other—from the paradoxes of unilateral disarmament to the first strike….Then I was talking one day with Alastair Buchan from the Institute of Strategic Studies and he mentioned the novel Red Alert which was published in 1958. I read it and of course I was completely taken by it. Now Red Alert is a completely serious suspense story. My idea of doing it as a nightmare comedy came when I was trying to work on it….This film presents a situation where a mad general launches his wing of bombers, and from then on everybody takes it quite seriously…in this case, a bit too late. Kennedy made a speech where he said that the world is living under a nuclear Sword of Damocles which can be cut by accident, miscalculation, or madness, and in this case it’s cut by madness.” (Stanley Kubrick, in Films and Filming, 1963). 93 min.

Friday, October 6, 6:00 p.m.; Sunday, October 15, 5:00 p.m. T2

Wag the Dog. 1997. USA. Directed by Barry Levinson. Screenplay by David Mamet and Hilary Henkin. Cinematography by Robert Richardson. With Dustin Hoffman, Robert de Niro, Anne Heche, Woody Harrelson, Willie Nelson. Not since Graham Greene charted America’s future involvement in Vietnam in The Quiet American has a work of art so strangely anticipated the future course of history. With Election Day only two weeks away, the fictional president of Wag the Dog hires a Hollywood producer to stage a fake war with Albania on television to divert attention from allegations he molested a young “Firefly Girl” in the White House. On August 28, 1998, some eight months after the film’s release and days after he admitted to having lied about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, President Clinton announced that the United States had bombed what he called terrorist bases in Afghanistan and the Sudan. The Wag the Dog analogy became the subject of obsessive speculation, with everyone from Henry A. Kissinger to the local greengrocer weighing in with an opinion. When two Republican Senators, Daniel R. Coats and Arlen Specter, questioned the President’s motives and condemned the military action, CNN political correspondent Jeff Greenfield echoed the sentiments of many by calling their insinuations “an extraordinary break with tradition” and a “sign of cynicism” of our times. 96 min.

Sunday, October 8, 5:00 p.m.; Tuesday, October 10, 6:00 p.m. T2

The Crazies (Code Name: Trixie). 1973. USA. Written and directed by George Romero. Cinematography by S. William Hinzman. With Lane Carroll, W.G. McMillan, Harold Wayne Jones, Lloyd Hollar, Richard Liberty. Following on Night of the Living Dead, the no-budget horror flick that made twenty-eight-year-old George Romero an instant cult legend, The Crazies (Code Name: Trixie) was also filmed near his hometown of

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Pittsburgh and also involved murderously possessed townies. When a U.S. Army plane carrying a biological warfare virus crashes near a small Pennsylvania city, the water supply is contaminated and the citizens begin to go mad. Lacking a cure and wanting to keep the whole debacle hush-hush, the government sends in the National Guard—clad in alien white protective jump suits—to quarantine the virus. With nary an explanation, martial law is declared and mass hysteria ensues, with neighbors killing neighbors, and young Evans City “freedom fighters” (ie. draft-dodgers?) engaged in shootouts with the occupying army. 103 min.

Tuesday, October 13, 6:00 p.m.; Saturday, October 14, 5:00 p.m. T2

Mad Max II: The Road Warrior. 1981. Australia. Directed by George Miller. Screenplay by Miller, Terry Hayes, and Brian Hannant. Cinematography by . With , Bruce Spence, Vernon Wells, Emil Minty, Mike Preston. The Australian director George Miller’s Mad Max II is a post-apocalyptic fantasy in which a psychotic band of savages lays siege to a group of settlers in a war over precious fuel. It befalls Mel Gibson’s Road Warrior, once a family man before his wife and child were murdered, now a gun-toting nomadic mercenary, to rescue the settlers and lead them across the desert to “Tomorrow-morrow” land, where they can build a utopia founded on democracy and a capitalist free-market system. Mad Max II was one of many dystopic fantasies of the 1980s that gave new currency to the old movie icon of the renegade antihero who must become an outlaw in order to defeat one. 91 min.

Note: All programs are subject to change without notice. The public may call 212/708-9480 to confirm schedule.

©1998 The Museum of Modern Art, New York

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